Hexagon Geospatial Starts Yearlong Hackathon in New York for Map Apps

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On Thursday, a Norcross, GA-based developer came to New York to kick off a hackathon that looks to inspire new ideas and uses for its geospatial mapping platform.

Hexagon Geospatial’s Smart M.Apps is a cloud-based platform that visualizes data in real time on digital maps, such as displaying reported crime patterns or transportation in a city. The company says Smart M.Apps could also be used to predict future activity based on the data it crunches.

Participants in the IGNITE hackathon have a shot at winning up to $100,000 for the grand prize, with a total of $260,000 expected to be disbursed amongst the finalists. The endgame is to use geolocation and data to create new applications—which Hexagon Geospatial and the developers would share revenue from. The first workshop for the competition begins today in New York. Other workshops will be held in cities such as Denver, San Francisco, and around the world.

Hexagon Geospatial’s president Mladen Stojic says the hackathon is a way to get coders and developers to create ideas that leverage the platform and data for such uses as public safety, infrastructure, and agriculture. “It’s an opportunity to be an entrepreneur and generate recurring revenue downstream with anything that’s built off our platform,” he says.

The competition, announced in January, is set to run through a good portion of the year. Teams will have until May 1 to submit their ideas. After a couple of weeks of voting by the public, 20 finalist teams will be announced in June, who will be guaranteed to reap at least $5,000 each. Then work will begin through the summer to develop their ideas on the platform. From September to December 1, the public will get to test and comment on the teams’ ideas. The prize money will be awarded on December 15.